5 . People ’ s Deputy of USSR Yury Afanasyev attends Moscow meeting to support Boris Yeltsin and Russian presidential referendum | RIA Novosti archive , image # 418402 / Alexander Makarov / CC-BY-SA 3.0 latter , witness to the past , it can be both a golden legend or a black legend , nostalgia or lasting resentment .
We can therefore postulate that the memories of communism that exist today in the European arena pertain to different levels of analysis that involve the consideration of the history of communism as it is written , memory policies ( or more broadly , public narratives of the past ) and vestiges of the lived experience in the same movement . Echoing Yuri Afanasiev ’ s contextualised point of view is this remark heard in Bulgaria in the context of the first elections of 1990 : “ Here , I remember is a powerful political argument ”.
Symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall , the collapse of communist regimes in Europe in 1989 – followed by German reunification in 1990 , and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 – immediately brought to light a “ retrieved memory ” in the East to quote a joint publication released in France in 1990 , in which the latter – witness both to the communist experience and to pre-communist history – had long been obscured by official history ,
confined to sites or private or niched social settings – as was also the case in the USSR – in literary or cinematographic productions , confidential or not . While obviously not homogeneous , this emerging public memory nonetheless revealed an overwhelming rejection of communist regimes in the East while it contributed in the West to further undermining already weakened Communist parties or , more broadly and in the same movement , the cornerstones of a memory of the workers ’ movement or of anti-fascist struggles , shared beyond communist parties alone . In France in particular , the publication of François Furet ’ s book Le passé d ’ une illusion . Essai sur l ’ idée communiste au XXe siècle [ The Passing of an Illusion . The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century ] in 1995 is a significant milestone in this regard .
But it was in 1997 , with the joint publication The Black Book of Communism , subtitled Crimes , Terror , Repression , edited by Stéphane Courtois , that the debate on the East-West divide as to the meanings of memory would take on new salience . Stéphane Courtois , in an extensive introduction that would
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Observing Memories Issue 5